Water Nightmare!

It seems at the moment that wherever you are in the world, water is at the centre of many conversations. Whether it is too much water or not enough, it dominates our lives in so many ways.

Why the watery blog post this week? Well, not only is it the theme for the competition on PPI this month (http://prophotoinsights.net/forum/index.php), but I've also been having a lot of nightmares lately and they all relate to falling into deep, dark, fast flowing water. I have no idea about dream interpretation, whether it's just all oddball notions or there's truth in it, but I do know that I have a waking fear of falling into water.

It'd probably help if I could swim properly but I'm one of those that swims with my head as far out of the water as my stretched neck will let it go. All splash, and thrashing limbs but very little forward propulsion.



I've tried to overcome my fears and put my head under water but so far with no success.

Anyway, that's all by-the-by really, the fact is that my life seems to be getting taken over by watery thoughts, fears, conversations, news items, whatever!

I think the nightmares are brought on by repeated showings of the dreadful Asian tsunami, but also memories of what happened to poor PC Barker, who lost his life in November when the bridge collapsed at Cockermouth.

Then there are the dreadful floods at Macchu Picchu, a remarkable place that has been on my bucket list now for many years; there have also been documentaries about bridge supports being undermined and washed away; news reports about the state of the Forth Road Bridge and how rusty cables can be heard snapping inside the structure; the Tay Rail Bridge disaster of, admittedly, well over a hundred years ago! Every time I look at the modern Tay Rail Bridge, I see the supports from the old bridge sitting alongside it as a kind of memorial to the lives that were lost.

Thinking about all these bridge collapses made me think about how I fell through a wooden bridge as a child. My whole family had walked across it just ahead of me with no problem at all. Along I trot quite merrily and then, crash, straight through and up to my armpits in splintered wood, with my legs kicking in the stream below.

I've also recently been talking to an ex-submariner, who described how they were trained inside some kind of enormous submerged tank thing. Of course that brought back memories of the dreadful Kursk disaster and, however it actually happened, the loss of all those men on the submarine.

So, all in all, it's no great surprise that I've been having a few watery nightmares lately!!

But that has got me thinking again about other people's real life nightmares. Not just from floods, tsunamis and bridge collapses, but from the opposite end of the problem.



Famine and huge-scale disaster as a result of lack of water; the enormous problems and fatalities as a result of lack of clean water and sanitation. How we complain that it's raining again when people across the tropics are suffering drought, famine, and disease as a result of not having enough.

Those who know me well enough know that I am deeply passionate about improving health care and sanitation to poor rural areas of developing countries. I support Water Aid (http://www.wateraid.org/uk/) and I have also joined the online queue for the toilet!! http://www.worldtoiletqueue.org/eng/queuers/join.

I am passionate about water. We need water to survive as much as we need air to breathe. It doesn't always feel like it sitting here in the soggy northern hemisphere, but water is increasingly becoming scarcer and, as a result, even more valuable. Where wars are currently fought over oil fields, we may well soon be seeing wars fought over water supplies. I hope not.

I hope that we can actually come together as a united group of human beings who share a planet to come to some sensible, achievable and workable plans about how all of our futures can be protected. I'm clearly not amongst the world leaders, but if I could, I would ask that they think very hard about what we can all do with water.

In our own small way, even when it is raining so hard that it's coming in sideways, we can help. We all know about not leaving the tap running when we brush our teeth, and about collecting rainwater for the summer garden and so on, but do we all do it all of the time? I don't, I'll admit that, but I am going to try and do more every day. Hopefully one day it'll be habitual and I won't think of it all.



I also hope that writing this blog has helped stop my watery nightmares!!

Rebecca,x
rebecca@rtphotographics.co.uk
http://www.rtphotographics.co.uk/